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AMD and Intel have played performance leapfrog since the introduction of the first Athlon. One month AMD will have the performance lead with Intel gazing unhappily at AMD's posterior, and the next month the roles will be reversed. Intel made the last leap with their Pentium III 1.13GHz, and now AMD is trying to hop to the front with their brand spanking new Athlon Thunderbird 1.1GHz.

The Athlon Thunderbird 1.1GHz is essentially the same as any other Athlon Thunderbird except that it is clocked at a stratospheric 1.1GHz. Thankfully, like Intel, it appears that AMD is giving up on those girly 50MHz clock speed increments for processors over 1GHz. The Athlon comes with the same 256k of full-speed on-die level 2 cache. It sports the same 128k of level 1 cache as before and it works on the same 100MHz double-pumped (200MHz equivalent) front side bus (FSB). So in our standard form, we snapped on some latex gloves, grabbed the thermal grease, then put an AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.1GHz through a complete set of benchmarks to bring you this review today.

Our goal today is to find out whether AMD leapfrogged Intel or fell flat on their face. We're kissing the frogs to find out who the prince is so that you don't have to.